Lettres À Ovide | AYMEN MBARKI and Guests
May 29, 2021 - July 17, 2021 | Club House Gammarth
For his first solo exhibition entitled “Letters to Ovid,” Aymen Mbarki, the self-taught artist, presents, in the most spontaneous way, a portrait of his journey as a free-gesture draftsman, saturated with impression and symbolic textures.
Drawing from an imagination rich in interest for Greco-Roman mythology, the artist distills the complex iconographies it generates to convey his own vision of the essential through a rigorously justified drawing line. His approach is so precise that the sufficiency of black on white stands as an immutable plastic entity, naturally evoking the signature of a work that distinguishes itself both aesthetically and conceptually.
In this exhibition, Aymen Mbarki showcases the breadth of his own plastic purification. He references the enchanted continuity of a fundamental method, whose density reveals itself through contemplation. His drawings, stripped of embellishments, are aesthetically returned to a sometimes unsettling simplicity. Indeed, immersed in a jumble of existential memories, Mbarki’s work unfolds, levitating toward an absolute that he continuously visualizes through representations of creatures born from his imagination.
The artist also conveys his understanding of plastic experimentation, always infused with a form of artistic spirituality, making poietic variations and deviations an expansion of his range, without fragmentation or acknowledged rupture.
His inclination toward representing the human, in its most poetic bestiality and providence, remains the unaltered conduit of his creation.
For “Letters to Ovid,” Aymen Mbarki proudly invited two currently active Tunisian artists. The first is Oussema Troudi, who, continuing his ongoing personal artistic practice, seizes the possibility to construct from what crumbles, both causes and means, subtly implying that meaning in art is gestural and that the gesture itself carries a moral to be grasped and preserved.
Oussema Troudi gives each pencil stroke a plenitude akin to that of a finished work, rendering its simplicity meaningful through pauses, retreats, rests, and hesitations, collected to signify its realism within continuous practice.
Aymen Mbarki also invites the young academic photographer Amira Lamti, who delights in experimentation within a plastic construction grounded in knowledge and reflection.
Amira Lamti, captivated by capturing “space-times,” creates her own material for composition and narrative. Her artistic principle, moving away from mere invention, involves playful superpositions, cutouts, temperance, etc., crafting a visual narrative that treats digital photography not for technical performance but for poetic elasticity and capacity for renewal.
“Letters to Ovid” is thus presented as an invitation to experience the works of three artists driven by the concrete incantation of plastic experimentation. Visitors will perceive a substantial affinity uniting different conceptual approaches into a series of renewable serenades.
- Asma Ghiloufi
